Category: About me

I have been through a lot of different things and feelings in the past few years. I have been juggling with sadness, fears, grief, heartbreaks, doubts, regrets, suffering and angers, in the essence that my life is no different with anyone else in this world. Hence, I know that everyone is trying to find their own ways around this crazy world as well.

Yes, life frustrated me at times. And although sometime it feels rather discouraging, I have to admit that I was never one who is so sure about myself either. But for as long as I can remember, I was always been this girl who knew how to regulate my coping skills through all kinds of storm. I was so used to rationalized things and understood my emotions before I sucked things up and keep moving towards my goal.

But, it seems like I had lost the compass that I carried in my pocket in order to direct the course of my life journey. Especially regarding ‘career’ decision.

In the past 2 years, I have changed job 3 times, within 2 different industries. I have been dealing with a wide range of different tasks, from compiling job candidates CVs, recruiting, delivering training programs, doing research, teaching, writing for an online media until negotiating rental price with property agents.

I don’t really know what I’m pursuing anymore.

I know life is trying to tell me that I was too young to figure things out, and I’m too young to settle. That I have to keep moving, to keep searching. I have to keep working on things in order to sort them out, slowly, one by one.

I know that life is trying to tell me to accept things the way they are and stop complaining. It tried to tell me how to be patient. Life is trying to tell me to go immerse myself within works and learn a thing or two. To solve one or two problems.

I’m so scared to see that the place where hopes and dreams were once the fuels that drive me forward are long gone. I’m so scared that one day I have to admit that life doesn’t fascinate me enough anymore for me to keep going.

I hope that day will never come.

I hope this is just me being a little tired of things around. Maybe this is just me who is momentarily longing for the state of content. Of not worrying too many things at once. I hope this is just a phase where I simply missed the feelings when I had things good, when I felt like I belonged to somewhere safe–a phase that I will get over with.

He was my best friend, my guidance, the one I always look up to and everything to me. I love him dearly, and I lost a big part of myself the day he left. I had never known before that grieve could feel this way. I cried every single day for the next 3 months. I didn’t know what I should be feeling. There was a stream of wide ranging intense emotions flowing inside me, in a way that I could not understand. Guilt, anger, sadness, void, relieved and everything else. Everything was so confusing as if the ground had been falling apart under my feet.

It was like falling into an endless hole without any grip where all I could see was darkness. Dark and cold; and lonely. There were bad days (trust me, they were really bad) when I didn’t feel like going out of my house or doing anything anymore. I started to hate everything and (almost) everyone. Everything seemed to be failed and broken, including me.

That time, I know exactly that life must go on—I just don’t know why.

It was depression that caught me in my worst condition last year and it was surprising—even to myself—that depression did not exactly feel the same way as what it’s been described in textbooks. Nor it was like what people complained on their social media. It was something different.

The whole experience was excruciatingly painful and immensely frightening.

It still is.

I constantly miss my dad and I miss my mom.

My bereavement is an on-going process and I might write about it more someday later. However, I’d like to share how it changed myself as a person and the way I see life, probably through some posts. As life has surprised and enlightened me in one of the most mentally exhausting way.

Since my dad died, I have become even more curious towards life. It’s captivating how life and death is interdependent towards one another where the death of one living being may give life to another. Even to some extent, we literally need to take the life of other living being to prolong ours. It’s also weird to see our life as something that represented merely by strings of attachment between us and everybody/everything else that we have built and nurtured during our course of life. We always constantly need to be attached with something or someone, as if that something defines on who we are. And then our fragile reality could have easily gone awry soon after something unexpected happened to the attachments we have developed.

It reminds me of how vulnerable and bleak our life is.

I feel like I’m being awakened by all of these intense emotion I have been dealing with regarding death. Probably Jim Morrison was right, pain is meant to wake us up; while most of the time we choose to avoid pain and the experience of it. We choose to be numb.

It gives me sense of clarity in a frustrating way (I don’t even know such thing could happen). We are so small and everything is momentary. We all will grow old and one day everyone and everything on this earth will eventually grow old and gone. It’s also frightening to realize that I will only live here briefly. It then brought me to another question of who I am and what I should be doing to my brief life since now I lost both my parents.

Well here I am, in the beginning of a new year with a lot of things to do and a lot of things to think of. Trying to be able to identify the “what is” instead of succumbing myself to ponder on the “what if”, before I could finally figure out the “how to”. Struggling with myself to find out what people really mean when they told me to embrace the unknown and living life to the fullest.

“…but it is something that I’m proud of. To be able to work with my husband, evolved with him, succeed together, achieve together, and celebrate life together. And we’re very proud of what we’ve accomplished. We always say to each other that the best is yet to come, believe it or not.”

(Celine Dion, about her 19th year of marriage with her husband. On The Ellen DeGeneres Show)

First of all, it feels kind of awkward to be writing all over again in this blog though it has been one of my favorite places to go to get a peace of mind. Well, I guess there are times when you’ll feel awkward, even in your own home, after being away for some specific amount of time, right?

It’s been almost 6 months ago since I had completed my master degree and graduated officially from the university. For those who wonder what I have been doing in between those months up until now, well, I am currently working in GLC Consulting as a Recruitment Consultant. As an HR Consultant firm, GLC Consulting providing several services to assist clients in enhancing their business process, such as Executive Search service, People Development service and Recruitment Information System service.

As a Recruitment Consultant in its Executive Search service, usually called by Headhunter–its informal and more popular name, my responsibilities include activities in developing business partnership with new and existing corporation clients and assist them in their recruitment process to fulfill monthly target. As a Headhunter, I don’t just ‘hunt’ or recruit any people. Most of our clients seek for candidates to fill in vacant middle to top level positions in their company, such as the Senior Manager, CFO and even the Director, which often occur as passive candidates who are not looking for a new job and already quite fulfilled with the job they are currently having.

So, it really depends on the creativity of how the recruitment consultant approach the candidates by doing what we call as ‘consultative selling or solution selling‘, where we try to describe to the candidates about the clients’ background and credibility, or the career enhancement opportunity, as well as the improvement in terms of salary package they would likely get if they agree to follow the recruitment process for the vacant positions and managed to succeed and be the selected ones.

Though I once involved in recruitment process in my internship period back in 2009 and had been handling several assessment projects for companies’ recruitment process, still, being a headhunter is pretty much a whole new world for me.

As now you know what I’ve been working on, you might have been wondering why I choose this job instead of something which suits my educational background in Clinical Psychology better. I must admit that being a Headhunter or involving in anything concerning HR Industry had never been part of my plan even though the area has been very attractive for me (FYI, I had taken some courses about Industry and Organizational Psychology back in my undergraduate years).

But some of you might also want to take into account that I don’t really have the luxury of actually choosing the job I want to do. As a Fresh Graduate who needs sufficient amount of monthly income for my family, getting a job which can provide me those as fast as I could is my first and only priority; and I couldn’t get that if I decided to work strictly in Clinical Psychology career path, not in Indonesia. At least not yet.

Apart from that reason, as you might also already know, just like what I’ve wrote before in ‘Meredefinisikan Mimpi’, sometimes we need to learn that life is not always about being in your ideal situation, that is to get everything we want or do everything we want to do. Sometimes life is all about breaking out from your comfort zone, to challenge yourself to do something you have never even thought exist, to then wait and see how it goes for you.

Because sometimes life is all about continuously redefining our dream and giving meaning to things.

Surprisingly, even to myself, I am enjoying the experience of being a headhunter, so far. I find it exciting as it gives me new things to explore, new people to meet, new lessons to learn. I feel comfortable being around my office colleagues and find them very supportive. I get to learn a lot about so many things from each of them, such as business, management, selling skills, fashion, relationships, family, basically about life in general. Though I also learned that there will always be competition among us, implicitly or explicitly spoken, like it or not. My bosses are cool and I really like how they care so much about the surrounding community that we have our own ‘CSR’ to ‘give back’ to the community. Not to mention there are always free flow food and drink served whenever someone in the office is having his/her birthday.

Basically, what I like most from my current working environment is how it stimulates me to grow and learn new things. We even have what we call as “Friday Discussion Session” (which held every Friday each week), where we can share any idea or opinion, either theoretical/conceptual or practical basis, as long as it relates with and/or enrich our knowledge/skill as professional recruiter. The delivery method combines lecturing, sharing and open discussion methods with or without Discussion Leader (Moderator). There is one presenter who shares discussion material and audience who actively respond to what Presenter conveys.

This way, we get to learn something new every week from each of us.

So here I am, living, and learning on how not to only doing what I love, but also loving what I do.

Admittedly, I find it very hard to accept the fact that I cannot jump right away into the field that I have been learning for the past 2 years. I can still feel the tickling sense of envy every time I read my friend’s update about her activities in the clinic where she manages her practice.

But who knows what comes next? I am enjoying my days at work and occasionally also getting clients (for psychological counseling) in my spare time. Who knows that maybe a day or two from now I’ll get a chance to get a place for me to open my psychology/counseling practice, or maybe later I get the chance to enhance my skills within the area through some courses, training, workshops, or even another degree.Or who knows that I might someday turns out succeed in HR field and gradually develop my own business in HR Consulting field.

Whatever comes next, I need to learn that when it happens, it happens in the right time and for the right reason.

It’s been a quiet year for me, in blogging-wise, of course. There are too much intense emotion left me weary and ended up unwritten within this ‘home’, for we know words often fail us in elaborating what we really felt.

However, it has been such a delight that WordPress summarized my blogging activity during the year. I always love their annual report feature. It gives me insight on what makes people read my blog and what I should write more about in the upcoming year, in order to make my blog useful for others instead of merely a place where I put everything else I couldn’t say upfront others.

Apparently, the most popular writings were the ones with psychology related topic in them, well, not so surprising. Apart from that, other popular writings seems to have something to do with relationship topic, which never ceased to amazed me. Seriously, relationship, no matter how many stories had been told about it, people have not been bored with them, yet. In fact, we are craving for more of them.

Well, thank you WordPress for the annual report. I will try to start reading and writing more in 2013 as in order to keep myself sane in the midst of this (currently) chaotic life of mine.

Happy New Year for us, mortals!

Really (and I mean, really, really) looking forward to more health, love, wealth, happiness, success, safety, prosperity and all the great things life might offer to us and our family in 2013. May God bless us always.

Here’s an excerpt:

600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 10,000 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 17 years to get that many views.